The Stonecutter (2000)

The Stonecutter is a present day drama about a man reclaiming his strength and creativity after years of denial and self-destructive anger. Ray Rucci, age 29, was once a gifted stonecutter who apprenticed with one of the masters, his father. At age 17, Ray found out about a dark family secret and his world fell apart. He ran away, in part to protect his sister by keeping this secret from her, and from a revered father now reviled. At war abroad in the Special Forces, then the years adrift, the trouble with the law - Ray remains a heart-hardened man at war with himself. The film opens as he intervenes a street fight, taking a man's life. That same evening he presents a necklace he's hand crafted to the woman who's trying to get him to open his heart and he gets a long-distance phone call from a step-mother he didn't know he had: his father is dying. Ray returns home to keep a promise that he'd made years before: that he'd cut his father's gravestone. As he searches for a way to forgive a man whose cowardice split apart the family, Ray finds himself trying to regain his father's respect. He discovers the healing power of love and his own life's purpose. This intimate father-son story touches a universal chord as it explores the passing on of an artistic legacy between generations in spite of the dark shadows of an unresolved past.